Please note: this show has been cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

Celestial Sorrow is Meg Stuart’s first collaboration with the Indonesian visual artist Jompet Kuswidananto. Based in collective memories and fictitious traumas, the duo create a world of light and movement that is inhabited by three performers and two musicians. The show premiered at the Kaaistudios in 2018 and is moving to the main stage of Kaaitheater for this reprise.

Warning: this show is cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

In this performance about information fast food, vanity, fiction and the urge for affirmation, the artistic duo Sarah & Charles goes in search of the ultimate form of submission. In an age in which social media and the internet are expanding our view of the world, our minds appear to be narrowing emotionally. The performers invite you to a creative wellness centre where you can put your decision-making on hold.

Warning: this show is cancelled to help contain the spread of the new coronavirus.

We live in an age in which human activity has a profound impact on our physical and ecological surroundings. How can we create stories, aesthetics, and spaces of experience to deal with this situation reflexively and critically? What role can the performing arts play in the climate crisis debate? This is the fourth in a series of performative conferences curated by David Weber-Krebs and Jeroen Peeters.

Does gender have a voice? Using drag, vogueing, striptease, YouTube tutorials as well as the triadic ballet by Oskar Schlemmer, seven bodies and many more objects try out new constellations, like surrealist ready-mades. With a great sense of irony, Escape Act presents hyper-stereotyped gender identities, only to deconstruct them completely.

Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert and Kim Snauwaert sketch an ambiguous image of their position as female artists in a contemporary feminist context. The performer adopts the weak position of an objectified female, and simultaneously transcends that fragility through its cynical staging. Snauwaert made this performative installation as a graduation project at KASK.

Einat Tuchman has worked in Molenbeek for the past several years. After long insistence, she was eventually given permission to use a cellar space in a community centre: she named it ‘Espacetous’. Everyone is welcome to talk, to work or just to be. Doha, a local girl, is a regular guest. Together, they made Other Enter, which talks about the difficulties that you encounter when launching neighbourhood projects and how they nevertheless manage to create a place for ordinary people where everyone can be themselves.

Spin, Spin, Scheherazade is a humorous and passionate monologue rooted in a form of artistic barefoot anthropology. Orla Barry directs Einat Tuchman, who explores the boundaries of art, gender, and the rural everyday. Coincidence, humour and a subtle language game are the ingredients of a performance that blends oral historiography with personal memories.

Podcast for Introverts is a one-woman performance, a poetic guide to living in this media-saturated world. Esther Mugambi and Marloeke van der Vlugt invite you into the process of creating their podcast – an ironic self-help manual. Especially for WoWmen!, they aremaking a new episode: How to be fluid. they explore shifting gender identities, watery landscapes and the search for a suitable pronoun for individual and collective stories.

For Moussem Cities: Algiers, Yasmina Reggad creates two new versions of her long-term research project we dreamt of utopia and we woke up screaming. #8 is the eighth iteration of the ever-evolving performance inspired by the radio documentary genre.

While many creators praise the empty stage as the central place for fantasy, in Physics and Phantasma it becomes compulsive and traumatic. The vacuum must at all costs by filled with something! To this end, Iggy Lond Malmborg takes you on a journey to random and dark corners of your imagination: the place where this solo takes shape.

Why is it important to cast a spotlight on the marginalized history of feminism in Romania and Eastern Europe? And what might this mean for our collective, historical consciousness? With a collage of feminist voices, artistic gestures, historical avant-garde, and traditional songs, Eszter Salamon focuses on Romanian histories.

During a meditative crying marathon that lasts almost an hour, two futuristic female characters question the mechanisms that turn personal emotions into political phenomena. In a choreography that uses video and large sheets of paper – simultaneously protest signs and drying laundry – their tears of weakness become an act of political power.

In the late 1920s, Nâzım Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkish poetry, and he was thus the first modern Turkish poet. He wrote the majority of Human Landscapes, his magnum opus, while in prison. The five hundred-page epic was only published posthumously, divided into five ‘books’. Michiel Vandevelde staged Book I last year, commissioned by steierische herbst. Book II now follows.

In the late 1920s, Nâzım Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkish poetry, and he was thus the first modern Turkish poet. He wrote the majority of Human Landscapes, his magnum opus, while in prison. The five hundred-page epic was only published posthumously, divided into five ‘books’. Michiel Vandevelde staged Book I last year, commissioned by steierische herbst. Book II now follows.

Shown and Told is a dynamic performance-collage founded on structured improvisation and associative leaps. It is an encounter between choreographer and dancer Meg Stuart and writer/performance artist Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment). Together, they explore the relationship between movement, images and the body as a performance instrument.

Michiel Vandevelde goes in search of traces of the legacy of May ’68, along with a new generation of young people. Will they open new perspectives on the future when they research half a century of history in a wild choreography of iconic images?

For a year, Decoratelier Jozef Wouters worked with Open Arts House Globe Aroma on Underneath Which Rivers Flow. A group of women and men – builders, poets and dreamers – met weekly in the Decoratelier in Molenbeek. Together, they built stories, a secret garden full of wormholes to unsuspected worlds.

WORKING TITLE FESTIVAL — We are shaped by an infinity of reflections, like a rainbow. This immersive installation – literally – reflects our differences and multiple identities. Inspired by The Conference of the Birds by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar, Fakoor reflects on the myth of a clear-cut national identity and the celebration of difference.

WORKING TITLE FESTIVAL — Do people treat plants with enough respect? What happens when plants break out of the background of our living rooms? Gosie Vervloessem calls on a number of horror movies in which plants frighten us. Sometimes they attack us head-on, but often the horror lies in ominously waving branches and rustling bushes. According to the artist the exploitative human-vegetal relation comes to a climax in the nature reserve, the plantation and the botanical garden. Places with a direct link to a colonial past.

WORKING TITLE FESTIVAL — Within a series of small compositions, bodies are placed and displaced in relation to each other. Playing with weight and balance, they counterbalance and shape the space between them. In the margin of the performance, Wouter Krokaert also shows the visual work that underlies it. What is explored in one area is reinforced and supplemented in another, across the boundaries of disciplines.

Eleanor Bauer loves playing with the codes and concepts of contemporary dance. In New Joy, she confronts the post-truth age: this dataistic cyber-musical knocks straight through the boundaries of various registers. From body language and spoken language to computer language and back again, from emotional to artificial intelligence, from movement to sound. Along with composer Chris Peck, Bauer engages all of your senses in her search for meaning and hidden implications.

This season, Decoratelier Jozef Woutersis collaborating with Open Kunstenhuis Globe Aroma to create Underneath Which Rivers Flow. A group of women and men – builders, poets, and dreamers – meet every week at Decoratelier in Molenbeek. In this space, they build stories together, a secret garden full of wormholes to unsuspected worlds.

In her new creation, Mette Edvardsen explores interfaces with opera, flanked by composer and performer Matteo Fargion. Together, they deconstruct the mythological figure of Penelope, the woman who spent years waiting for her husband Odysseus. But her apparent passivity conceals tremendous power. Be whisked away to this intimate, minimalist dream world, where new relationships are forged between women, the world, and the other.

This performance moves to the 2019-2020 season due to productional reasons.

We would like to invite you to our New Work, which does not yet exist. It is still lurking somewhere in an invisible, intimate place, yet to be made, and is still carefully looking for words to present itself to you.